


Hunting For Ghosts

by msdisdain



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Mockingjay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 04:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msdisdain/pseuds/msdisdain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The small number of people who had returned to Twelve kept regular hours; they did not know that a half-dead mentally and physically scarred baker roamed the streets every night, looking for people he would never find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunting For Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [passionately_curious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/passionately_curious/gifts).



_I'm just a ghost in this house_  
 _I'm just a shadow upon these walls_  
 _As quietly as a mouse I haunt these halls_  
 _I'm just a whisper of smoke_  
 _I'm all that's left of two hearts on fire_  
 _That once burned out of control_  
 _It took my body and soul_  
 _I'm just a ghost in this house_

**PEETA**

The first time he saw Gale, he thought he was another ghost.

Every night, he tried to sleep. He took off his clothes, opened his window (without looking out; it did his sleep attempts no good to look out), and crawled between his sheets in the dark. He curled up on the right side of the bed (because once on a train she had been on his right, and even hijacking hadn't changed where he'd slept ever since) and closed his eyes and tried to sleep. And maybe he did, for minutes--or hours--but in the end, it never mattered. At some point he would push himself from the bed and go ghost hunting.

His feet (one false, one real) carried him out the door and around the corner of the house, past the light that Haymitch never turned off, past the evening primrose bushes and the herb garden he'd planted for sanity's sake, toward the center of the ruined town. Every night, the same path. Every night for months. He never walked this path during the day. He could not face this path during the day. During the day the air carried too many noises back to him--the sawing and banging that accompanied construction, and the shouts and laughter that inevitably joined them. These were not the noises he remembered. The voices were not those that he sought.

He could bear that knowledge only in the middle of the night.

Those working on rebuilding the district stayed on the far side of town in hastily constructed temporary housing. They rose early and went to sleep early; Thom had volunteered this information when he'd first arrived from Thirteen to join the construction crew. He'd filed it away, along with the invitation to help, but when he'd begun waking in the middle of the night just days later, the information was there like a guidebook.

That was when his nightly hunting trips had started.

But unlike Katniss when she'd slithered under the fence and into the woods, seeking living creatures to kill and trade to feed and clothe her family, he hunted the dead.

Every night his feet traced the same path. He started in the town square where the bakery once stood, pacing the foundation, straining to hear his father's laughter. The teasing words of his brothers. He even longed for the caustic and cruel sound of his mother's insults and taunts--anything, anything at all from any one of them, as long as it meant he was not the last of his line.

If he made it beyond the bakery--and many nights, the bakery was all he could bear--he sought the others who haunted his nightmares. Friends from school. Fellow merchants from town. The red-headed Peacekeeper whose name he could not allow himself to remember. And when he failed to find any of them there, he let his feet carry him to the meadow. If he made it this far, more often than not he would wake there in the morning, unable to remember lying down at the edge of the freshly dug dirt, and painfully aware of the ghosts who lay beneath him.

He never saw anyone on his walks. Haymitch was always awake, but never left his house during the day, let alone in the dark of night. The small number of people who had returned to Twelve kept regular hours; they did not know that a half-dead mentally and physically scarred baker roamed the streets every night, looking for people he would never find. Everyone he had loved was dead or gone, and he was beginning to wonder if maybe he wasn't a ghost himself.

Which is why when the tall, dark figure first appeared, he thought Gale was just another ghost come to haunt him for always.

**GALE**

The last thing he expected to see in the middle of the night was Peeta Mellark, in the center of what had once been a town, pacing the same large square over and over again. He wasn't sure what he'd expected when he'd thrown off the blanket and pushed up from Thom's couch and strode out into the night, but Peeta wasn't it.

He watched from a distance for a long while, waiting to see if the slow-moving figure would move on from what he had finally realized was the former site of the bakery. But while Peeta occasionally stopped, putting his head in his hands or grabbing at his hair or, once, just standing still, face turned up to the sky, he never walked away.

His feet traced the same path, again and again.

Gale understood repetition. His life was filled with it. Orderly meetings about rebuilding districts or the restructuring of the military forces. Simple meals for one made from military rations or, occasionally, from food stalls that had begun to spring up in town. Waking before sunrise; falling asleep eighteen hours later. One set of numbing experiences which, when repeated for enough days in a row, almost allowed you to pretend your nightmares weren't about real things.

He suspected that if he stayed in Twelve long enough, he'd find himself pacing his own square down in what was once the Seam.

He rubbed the spot between his eyes that had been aching for months, and when he lifted his head again, his eyes met Peeta's. 

Slowly he covered the distance between them. He stopped several feet away and the two of them just stared at each other. Even in the dim moonlight it was easy to see Peeta's gaunt figure, drawn face, and slumped posture. The two men couldn't look any less alike; but still, for Gale, it was a little like looking in a mirror.

It had been a long time since he'd seen anyone look as haunted as he felt.

"Are you...real?" Peeta finally managed, his voice hoarse from disuse.

"What?" Gale wasn't sure he'd heard him correctly.

"Are you real?" Peeta repeated, and when Gale just stared at him, he stumbled on, like having a conversation was something he didn't do very often. "I just...don't ever see people at night. Just--just ghosts." His voice trailed off at the end.

"You...see ghosts?"

At the dubious tone of Gale's voice, Peeta's mouth twisted. "Not real ones. I've gotten--my mind has gotten better, not worse. I see...memories, I suppose. I go looking for them."

"Why?" Gale asked, his voice coming out harsher than he had intended when he realized his throat felt thick with something. Sorrow? Sympathy? 

Recognition, maybe.

"Why are you here? She isn't here. Your family isn't here." Peeta started walking again, his pace slower than before. "Sae saw you on television. Thought you were all set in Two."

Gale rubbed the spot between his eyes again. This conversation, much like his entire day since stepping off the train that morning, was doing nothing to help the steady thrum of pain. "Came for a couple of days to report on what's most necessary to aid in rebuilding."

Peeta's feet stilled and he turned, pinning the other man with a glance. "They wouldn't ask you to come back here; they're resettling and reassigning anyone who asks and can demonstrate need or willingness to contribute. You had to suggest it yourself."

"Yes," Gale replied flatly, briefly wondering why Peeta knew that before he realized the answer was obvious. "You did the same thing."

"But I moved back permanently. All I have are the ghosts, and they're all here. You're here visiting...why?"

"Maybe I came looking for ghosts too."

"Your family is alive. She's alive," Peeta snapped. "Why are you here?"

"Why do you care?" Gale shot back. "This is my home. Just because my family got out doesn't mean I don't have ghosts everywhere."

"I care because it's hard enough to be here alone. I don't need to see you every day to remind me of what's been taken from me."

"Your family was too far away from the fence! Damn it, Mellark, I would have gotten the entire fucking district out if I could have."

Peeta stared at him for a long moment, something in his jaw twisting, and then his entire body sagged. Gale could almost see the fight leaving him. "Not my family." He turned away, walking in the direction of the Victor's Village. 

It took Gale a long moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about, and when he did, he took off in a half-run that covered the distance between them easily. "I don't know what you think you know, but it's wrong."

He stood just behind Peeta, who stopped walking, but didn't turn around. "I know enough. I know they're letting her out. I know Haymitch isn't going to get her--Johanna is. Which means she isn't coming here. And I know that Seven's in terrible shape, and they've offered living Victors and other war heroes living quarters and jobs in Two; they offered them both to me. So forgive me for having done very well at math in school." Peeta started to walk away again. "Enjoy yourself."

Gale let him go for a minute, not having foreseen this situation and being slow to recover. "I thought you were better. I thought the intensive treatment in the Capitol worked; that you regained yourself and your memories."

Peeta stopped again. "Yes. Mostly."

"Then you really are the idiot I always thought you were." When Peeta turned, something like anger sparking in his eyes, it was Gale's turn to look away. "She's coming home. Not going to two. Johanna apparently wants to see how you and Haymitch are doing, so she volunteered to travel with her." When Peeta said nothing, he continued. "They wanted a member of the military who knew you both before to evaluate the possible safety of the situation and the condition of the district. She doesn't know I'm here. I'll be gone tomorrow afternoon."

Finally Peeta turned around. "She's...coming back here?"

Gale couldn't bring himself to do anything but nod.

"For good?"

"I don't fucking know, Mellark; she won't talk to me. You'll have to ask her yourself," he finished, bitterness edging the tone of his voice.

"You know why," Peeta said, his voice shaking.

"Yes, and you know what it's like to have people vilify you for something that ultimately wasn't your fault."

**PEETA**

Despite his deep-seated belief that Katniss's anger at Gale was justified, he knew what it was like to have her affection and then have it taken away. While he had no idea what her return to the district would mean for either of them, he would at the very least be seeing her on a regular basis. Still. "Coin couldn't have done that if it wasn't for what you built."

He expected an explosion, but Gale just shook his head. "Do you think I don't think about that every day?" he asked, his voice low and unsteady. "But as much as I blame myself, and can't blame her for feeling the way she does, I also know that even if I'd never dreamed those bombs up, Coin would have found something else equally as horrible to do. She was going to hurt Katniss any way she could, and the easiest way to do that was to do something to Prim."

He winced at the sound of her name. It conjured up, as it always did, a flash of the kindness Prim had always shown him, and for an instant the world turned shiny. He fisted his hands and pressed them to his eyes, breathing deeply in the way he'd been shown, strong with the knowledge that he'd realized where his thoughts were going quickly enough. 

When he opened his eyes again, Gale was staring at him through narrowed eyes. "You said you were better. They said you were better."

"I am," Peeta said, a sudden wave of exhaustion making him aware of just how long it had been since he'd slept well. "It just comes back sometimes. They taught me a bunch of stuff to deal with it. Visualizations. Special breathing. The kind of stuff that sounds like Capitol garbage but turns out to actually work the majority of the time."

"And when it doesn't?"

"I pick a pill. It turns out they come in every color of the rainbow, just in case you happen to be the first hijacked person in history to get better, but they still need to ensure that you have a backup plan in case you feel yourself going off the rails. I lock myself in my painting room. I call the doctor."

Gale didn't say anything in response. They stood in silence for until something else occurred to him. "You said 'evaluate the possible safety of the situation.' You mean me."

Their eyes met, and Gale gave a curt nod. 

"What are you going to tell them?"

"The same thing I told them when they sent me here: that you aren't going to hurt her." As Peeta's jaw dropped slightly in surprise, Gale raised a hand in farewell and turned to leave.

"Wait. Gale, wait." When Gale turned back, Peeta took a step toward him. "Why would you do that?"

Instead of answering, Gale asked his own question: "Do you still love her?"

Peeta held his gaze a long moment before closing his eyes and letting his head drop. This was a question he asked himself many times a day, and despite the fact that he still had many moments where what was real and what wasn't was unclear, he always came up with the same answer. He opened his eyes and lifted his head.

"Yes."

"Then you shouldn't be asking me why."

**THE NEXT MORNING**

He didn't think he was up for meeting the train. His wounds were still raw, and he had no idea how she would greet him. Instead he woke with the dawn and baked two loaves of bread, thick with nuts and raisins. District Twelve bread. His father's bread, and now his. Bread that could stave off hunger, and might be a welcome sight after a long day of travel. One he left on Haymitch's doorstep, still steaming in the pan. The other, he wrapped in a cloth and settled in the bottom of a basket. On top of the bread he laid the most perfect flower he could find on the evening primrose bushes.

And when he walked slowly away from the front porch of Katniss's house, he felt something inside so long lost he had thought it gone forever:

Hope.


End file.
